Sally, the younger sister of Peanuts’ Charlie Brown, did not perform well in school. She wrote reports the morning they were due. She failed multiple exams. As an overachieving child, I attributed her poor performance to laziness. But now that I’m an educator, I understand where she was coming from.

Throughout her three years at Riot Games, the company behind League of Legends, Lacy made it her mission to hire a woman into a leadership role. Lacy had heard plenty of excuses for why her female job candidates weren’t Riot material. Some were “ladder climbers.” Others had “too much ego.” Most weren’t “gamer enough.”…

While playing Super Mario Odyssey, you’ll occasionally come across portraits like the one pictured above.They are visual puzzles that lead players to hidden Power Moons. Odyssey calls them Hint Art, and there are 21 of them scattered throughout the game. They’re visually intensive and clever, and they’re a great…

Last December, a 22-year old modder who calls himself Ted52 purged the Steam forums for his Hearts of Iron IV mod, Millennium Dawn. Steam’s infrastructure made it difficult to remove unsavory threads individually, and he tells me he has more control of things over at his Discord channel, where he can eliminate any…

If you ever find yourself in the cast of a Dragon Ball fight scene, Christopher Sabat has some advice. “You can either scream once, and make it really epic, and it really hurts, but you only have to do it one time,” explains the man who voices several cosmic soldiers in the Dragon Ball universe. “Or you can kinda fake…

Lucy’s relationship to Schroeder was unfulfilling. She craved emotional validation from the one character who was least equipped to provide it. It was both humorous and sad—a contradictory message that Charles Schulz’s Peanuts conveyed so well.

Call of Duty has returned to World War II. It wasn’t so long ago that Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare saved us from drowning in World War II games. Unfortunately, its success meant we spent the next several years drowning in modern military shooters instead, and when we got tired of that, game devs gave us near-future…

I never pass up the opportunity to drink in a game. I’ve visited every bar in The Witcher 3. I’ve filled Adam Jensen’s pockets with booze in Deus Ex; I’ve chugged those drinks in the bars in Hengsha and Prague, alone in his apartment, or on street corners just because. I’ve gotten Commander Shepard blackout drunk in…

Last fall, Dishonored 2 ripped me right out of my gaming funk. I tore through the game in two days, scouring every square inch of its wonderful setting, Karnaca. Dishonored 2’s brilliant self-assurance is compelling; I couldn’t stay away. Now, after the release of Dishonored: Death of the Outsider, I found myself…

Back in 1973, Steve Miller Band’s “The Joker” was blaring from the PA in a California warehouse as two dozen women in flared jeans assembled Pong circuit boards. The smell of corned beef and marijuana wafted down the manufacturing line. Orders for Atari’s landmark table tennis video game were still pouring in on the…

On Christmas, like many people all around the world, I spent some quality time with my siblings hunched around a video game. During a standard run through one of Super Mario 3D World’s many colorful levels, my sister asked if it was weird for Mario to be running around and attacking a bunch of cute creatures minding…

Rudy stands in front of his regal mahogany bookcase stocked full with classics like the Iliad, the Odyssey, and Arabian Nights. He holds a shrink-wrapped booster box parallel to his messy plume of hair. It’s Dark Ascension, the 57th expansion for the card game Magic The Gathering.

The madam Queen Tepe met me near a bustling harbor in Final Fantasy XIV. “Will you be coming to the mansion?” she asked me. “I’d appreciate an escort,” I responded. Moments later, I’d meet five of them.

For 13 minutes, Gonzalo “Zero” Barrios’ face barely moved. It was the Grand Finals match of a Super Smash Bros. Wii U tournament, and Barrios, the best Smash player in the world, was squaring off against a formidable opponent. A few feet away, Barrios’ bodyguard kept a lookout for a man who’d threatened to be there,…

Over the course of three years, an impostor convinced the Smash community—as well as her friends, housemates and girlfriend—that she was a reclusive and revered programmer behind the famous Smash mod, Project M, several sources close to the issue say.